March 12, 2006

“l guess this means I’m not going to win best director,” said George Clooney on winning the best supporting trophy at the 78th Academy Awards ceremony. Clooney won the award for his portrayal of a spy caught in a power game between nations in Syriana, a tense political drama directed by Stephen Gaghan, the writer of Traffic who based the film on the book See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA’s War on Terrorism. The only other politically inclined award went to Rachel Weisz (best supporting actress) for her embodiment of John Le Carre’s Tessa Quayle (The Constant Gardner), an activist who meets an end while investigating a pharmaceutical intrigue in Kenya.

In a night filled with political films and messages (on winning the Oscar for best director, Ang Lee remarked: “I wish I could quit you” recalling one of Brokeback Mountain’s better known lines), the eye-catching twist at the end of the extravaganza event echoed the heartfelt upset of the best picture that the audiences felt. The shock of Crash winning the coveted Oscar for best picture was so unexpected that the shockwave was heard even backstage, a place these writers witnessed it live via the Internet.

With a familiar frilled blue logo of M-Net no longer clogging up the airwaves in Karachi for the sake of saving younger viewers of occasionally unsavoury content, the dilemma of watching last Monday morning’s Academy Awards unfold live this year didn’t emerge as a severe predicament until much later. And by then it was totally out of our hands to conjure a last-minute save.

According to the local schedules Star Movies, the Asia-based News Corp-owned channel was slated to broadcast the event live from the Red Carpet followed by the actual awarding some half-hour later, but thanks to an accustomed growing pain of channels being shifted around at a moments notice, the Oscars were nowhere to be seen.

It didn’t require a genius’ IQ to deduct that the Star Movies being seen that day wasn’t the one televising the Oscars. Here, we would be seeing the Oscar awards stale, by Thursday.

Thanks to a beguiled form of luck and modernism, we were able to watch the event live from quick bits coming in from CNN, BBC, the Internet movie data base and the Oscar’s website, which had a real-time online stream of the backstage Q&A session with the personality as each award happened.

The theme of a political Oscars was a given when Jon Stewart was designated as the host this year. Stewart, who stars in his own fake political show, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, on Comedy Central and CNN International, seemed like an anomalous alternative for the extravaganza, and as the show advanced, the viewers knew why.

During the show, Stewart had many gibes at the Democrats and as worded correctly in The New York Times coverage of the Oscars, his “court jester’s combination of sarcasm and flattery seemed to work with the Hollywood royalty in the room.” Outside of that, people have been asking “Jon Stewart who”?

As a joke, he declared that Bjork, the Icelandic pop-icon was shot down by Dick Cheney. He said that the Bjork would not be attending the ceremony as apparently “she was trying on her Oscar dress and Dick Cheney shot her”, making fun of the swan outfit the singer wore to the Oscars some years ago.

He also barbed about a pimp as “an agent with a better hat”, when he introduced Terrance Howard, the actor who plays a pimp aspiring to be a rapper in Hustle and Flow.

In a prerecorded sequence relating to Brokeback Mountain, he said that the film had tarnished the image of the “unfalteringly heterosexual American western”. Musing at Steven Spielberg’s turn on the political-thriller ‘trilogy’, as he called it, he said that after Schindler’s List and Munich “I think I speak for all Jews when I say, I can’t wait to see what happens to us next.”

Clearly Stewart’s talents for political wisecracking drew mixed reactions from the audiences and the critics. Those who follow his TV show on CNN every week found that he was not on recognizable terrain on stage.

Preoccupied with political thrillers that were nominated, Steven Spielberg’s Munich and George Clooney’s Good Night and Good Luck failed to win any Oscars this year, while Brokeback Mountain, Crash, Memoirs of a Geisha and King Kong each won an equal number of awards.

Crash, the kaleidoscopic character drama based on racial confrontation on winning the Academy Award for best picture threw the curve ball mentioned in last week’s article in these pages. Also, most of the ‘will win’ and ‘should win’ predictions did come through.

More then one critic found Crash to be less than perfect. According to The San Francisco Chronicle’s Mick LeSalle: “In the end Crash lacks a cumulative impact. It takes audiences to new places, but we’ve all been to similar places, and we walk out knowing no more than we did walking in.” Animadversions aside, Crash indeed reminds one of Magnolia, Traffic and Grand Canyon, but on another level, it is without doubt a better ensemble piece in comparison to Brokeback.

Whereas the latter was indulgent in uncontrollable emotions with good shots and spectacular music that elevated each scene to near-classic status, Crash’s winning hand was the direction the racism was taken on by Haggis. The film actually makes a statement against liberals who don’t consider themselves as racist.

Simply put, Munich was a better film than Capote and Good Night and Good Luck was better than Capote, while Brokeback Mountain better than Good Night and Crash was better than Brokeback.

While writing this piece, Jay Leno is sharing his opinions with Ebert and Roeper, one of his infrequent guests. Ebert is right to agree that “mainstream America is out of touch with good movies”. Most of the normal cine-going audiences have little regard for films like Paradise Now and Munich, while a mass of weekenders just swarm over King Kong.

Did Munich make as much money as War of the Worlds? You decide.